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What I find inexcusable is the defense industry response to the political infighting between the Democrats and Republicans on this issue. Once it became a political football, the defense industry knew it could drag out development for as long as possible. Any failures they had were covered by the infeasibility arguments the Democrats were making. They even keep quotes like ‘hitting a bullet with a bullet’ on their websites to make it seem like they aren’t milking the US taxpayer in slow, over 2 decade development of these systems. The waste is inexcusable. The fact that prominent scientists were willing to lie in front of Congress by testifying to the ‘impossibility’ of developing missile defense systems is embarrassing. The fact these people are not suffering any consequences for their actions is again inexcusable. None of it will get better unless you, the person footing the bill, demand that it get better from your elected officials.

Bram: Yesterday while discussing this I had the following thought process in about ten seconds: 1) Our ABM system has virtually no chance of hitting incoming ICBMs 2) We know this because the tests have gone so badly 3) Unless the ‘failures’ are a smokescreen for a truly successful system 4) But keeping it secret would defeat the purpose of a deterrent defensive weapon 5) Unless it’s so good that we’re actually goading folks into shooting at us 6) So we can shoot the missiles down and they won’t know what ‘went wrong’ 7) That’s brilliant 8) And very freaking unlikely LOL!